


A Hollow Space

by velveteenshadowboxer



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disturbing Themes, First Kiss, M/M, Not Suitable/Safe For Work, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Serial Killers, dark!stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:35:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velveteenshadowboxer/pseuds/velveteenshadowboxer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That last week of summer in the year before his mother succumbs to her illness and his father turns to the drink, Stiles finally graduates from squashing insects and sticking cats’ heads on poles and directs his attention to more challenging prey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hollow Space

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure where the hell this came from.

That last week of summer in the year before his mother succumbs to her illness and his father turns to the drink, Stiles finally graduates from squashing insects and sticking cats’ heads on poles and directs his attention to more challenging prey.

It’s clumsy, the first time. He’s not sure exactly how to go about it, just leaps at the chance when the opportunity arises.

The boy he knows from around the neighborhood, has seen him playing with his sister on the lawn in front of his house. He waits for the right time and catches him alone, then takes him by the hand and leads him deep into the woods out back, far from sight.

“Mommy,” the boy protests, looking anxiously over his shoulder. He’s about four or five, and his face is starting to flush red, big eyes growing moist and worried.

Stiles smiles reassuringly and squeezes the small hand struggling in his grip. “It’s alright,” he says. “It’s ok.”

He turns the boy around and kneels behind him, snakes one arm around his neck and uses the other as a brace against the kid’s back. The boy start to wail in fear and pain as he starts to twist, but he doesn’t flail much, doesn’t know how to fight back.

Stiles’ heart is hammering in his ribcage as he hears the snap of the boy’s neck, and when the body in his arms goes limp and dead, he exhales long and slow, shivering with adrenaline and feeling the child’s flesh turn cold and clammy. He lets go eventually, lets the body slump to the ground and stares wide-eyed at his handiwork. His excitement soon turns to panic, though, and he curses himself for not taking better precautions; he’s a cop’s son and knows about DNA, and he didn’t even think of fingerprints.

He calms himself and drags the body to a place where he remembers seeing an animal burrow at the base of a dead oak tree. When he finds it, he stuffs the corpse headfirst into the dark hole in the earth and pushes and shoves until only the kid’s left shoe is visible. He kicks some dirt and leaves over the red sneaker, then returns home.

Somehow, miraculously, the body is never found. And as that knowledge slowly sinks in over the next several weeks and months, a new kind of thrilling emotion worms its way into Stiles’ heart and settles there like a cancer.

 _I got away with it_ , he thinks to himself wonderingly one night at dinner, and then has to make up a reason for his father why he’s grinning at nothing.

He’s three weeks away from his tenth birthday at the time.

*****

He never remembers any of his dreams. All of his visions come in waking moments, flashes of blood and bone and tearing flesh, like a film reel on repeat playing endlessly in some dark room in the back of his brain, occasionally clawing forth to the forefront of his thoughts.

He takes his thrills where he can get them, which mostly come in the form of the true crime novels he borrows from the library. He photocopies his favorite pages and keeps them in a binder in his closet to return to whenever he wants. By the time he’s twelve, he has amassed a collection of nearly three hundred pages, dog-eared and wrinkled from over-handling.

When he discovers masturbation, it’s images of piano wire slicing through throats and spilling redness from the wounds in the skin that send him over the edge and into bliss.

“I think maybe I’m a little weird,” he remarks to his dad one night in front of the TV.

His father ruffles his hair affectionately. “A little weirdness never hurt anyone,” he says, then smiles quizzically when Stiles laughs so hard he nearly cries.

*****

Remarkably, he makes it until age twelve before he decides he’s waited long enough for another go.

He plans it out carefully. The victim this time around is about the same age as the last one, give or take a couple months; this is by coincidence, not design. Stiles tricks him easily enough, capitalizes on the boy’s gullibility and trustfulness and plays the role of the cool older kid who doesn’t mind hanging out with younger boys. He leads him down into the quarry and behind the bigger rocks where there’s no chance any potential passerby can see.

He opens his duffel bag and draws out the tarp, lays it down and steps back to pull on the latex gloves. The raincoat goes on next, full-body and clear colored with drawstrings that pull the hood tight around his face leaving only a small hole to breathe through. His shoes he’s already wrapped up in plastic bags.

The kid’s eyes go round as saucers when Stiles pulls out the little paring knife, but he doesn’t cry out, not yet. So far he’s just curious; he still thinks maybe this is just some game they’re playing together. No, he doesn’t start crying until Stiles is slicing him up, shallow cuts at first and then deep stabbing wounds in between his ribs.

Stiles watches for a bit while the boy sobs and gulps for breath through his ruined lungs. He gets bored quickly and finishes it with a jab through the right eye. The rush is even greater this time, the feeling of accomplishment doubled as a result of the meticulous planning.

 _I did this_ , he thinks, admiring his creation. _I thought this and made it so_.

He’s never felt so powerful.

He wraps the body in the tarp like a caterpillar in a cocoon and carries it to where he dug a grave the day before. He buries it and plants a rosebush in the soil above. The coat and gloves he burns, and the shovel he returns to its original place in the garage at Scott’s house.

When he returns home and his father asks where he’s been all day, he replies, “Playing.”

After a thorough rinsing, he puts the knife back in the kitchen drawer with the others. It’s stupid to keep it, he knows. He’s watched enough TV to know how many killers get caught because of dumb mistakes like that. But he can’t help himself, and it’s the one trophy he feels safe keeping around.

And the borderline erotic sensation that twists low in his belly every time he sees his father cutting up oranges with the same tool he used to take a life is indescribable.

*****

Things continue in this way for years, each incident cautiously spaced out from the next.

It’s always kids, though not for sexual reasons. Stiles isn’t quite sure himself what exactly it is. It’s not really about the panic of the town when one of his playthings goes missing, or about the suffering of the parents. He gives little thought to any of that; indeed he’s only concerned with others in relation to the possibility of someone stumbling upon the knowledge of his hidden nature. Beyond that, he doesn’t give two shits.

So maybe it’s just the irresistible allure of the look on a child’s face when terrified realization and a lifetime’s worth of adult understanding and experience crash down upon him all at once in the last moments of his existence. Nothing’s sweeter.

And it’s always boys, too. But that’s just good etiquette.

You don't beat up girls, everybody knows that. She may be gone now, but his mother raised him to be a gentleman.

*****

“Lacrosse,” Scott suggests the week before high school starts. “We should try out.”

Stiles frowns. “I dunno,” he says. Scott nudges him with his foot from where he’s sprawled out on the bed tossing a bouncy ball at the ceiling.

“Come on. It’ll be good for us. We’ve gotta expand our social circle sometime, right?”

Stiles forces a smile and says he’ll think about it. He’s known this would happen eventually, that Scott would start to care more about what other people think, that to keep their friendship alive he’d have to at least feign interest in new things.

So they try out. Because Scott is the perfect friend for him, and Stiles can’t afford to lose that. Scott strikes the right balance between gullibility and sharpness, the usual brand of adolescent narcissism and an unusual capacity for deeply evolved empathy. He’s smart enough to be interesting to talk to and not smart enough to really _see_ Stiles. He lets Stiles talk and chatter, and anytime Stiles slips up and says something that would ring alarms with anyone else, Scott just chalks it up to quirkiness and leaves it at that. This all suits Stiles just fine.

They make the team and they’re both benchwarmers, but Scott seems to enjoy it all the same. So Stiles is content, too.

It’s something to do, at least.

It doesn’t take long for Jackson Whittemore to decide that they’re both losers, and whenever he deigns to address either of them, in those precious moments that he bothers to pretend they exist at all, he does so only to assert his superiority in the bluntest manner he can conceive of. His harassment is largely targeted at Scott; Stiles is barely on his radar at all.

“Don’t bother wearing your jerseys to the game,” he calls sneeringly across the field after Thursday afternoon practice. “Just bring a couple of glittery signs to cheer us on with the rest of the girls.”

Stiles sometimes pictures what Jackson’s head would look like carved open at the top and hollowed out inside like a jack-o-lantern.

He knows he’ll never act on such thoughts, though. It’s too risky to target anyone he knows personally, and cops always look for connections like that straight away. Besides, his work is too special and too beautiful to be sullied by some idiot jock. Jackson doesn’t deserve the kind of transformation Stiles has to offer.

*****

His father’s drinking problem probably plateaued about a year and half after his mother’s death. It hasn’t gotten any worse since then, but it hasn’t gotten better either.

Stiles doesn’t mind, exactly, but he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He was present when Claudia drew her final breath, and he felt very little in that moment and even less now. He thinks his father attributes his numb indifference to PTSD or something, which is just as well. Grief is just another of the many emotions he can’t quite conjure up.

For a while he thought maybe those things were bottled up inside him somewhere, and that someday they could possibly burst forth into being, like a cork coming unstopped. But he’s older now and more self aware, and he suspects it’s mostly nothingness, a hollow space in his head where his soul keeps searching for what’s missing and coming up empty.

“I brought her flowers today,” his father tells him on the latest anniversary of her death, collapsed in his armchair with a glass of scotch, the knees of his suit stained brown from the dirt at cemetery. “It was worse than last year, somehow. I thought it would hurt less, but it doesn’t.”

“They say time heals all wounds, but it’s bullshit,” Stiles offers, hoping the sentiment is agreeable.

He’s rewarded by a bitter laugh and a drunken clap on the back. “Language,” his father chides halfheartedly. The palm against his back slides up to cradle his neck, thumb rubbing in soothing circles. His dad stares up at him sadly. “Your face,” he murmurs, eyes glazed. “Some days you remind me so much of her, it’s painful to even look at you.”

Stiles doesn’t know what to say to that, but he’s saved from responding by a quick tug on the collar of his shirt and chaste kiss against the corner of his mouth.

It’s innocent, of course, and completely without ill intent, but it’s inappropriate enough that when he comes down to breakfast the next morning, Stiles can guess the reason for the tension in his father’s shoulders and the self-loathing expression the man tries badly to hide from him.

He exploits that guilt and gets his dad to buy him three new comic books that week.

*****

The next, Number 9, is the first to ask.

“Why?” the boy says, his face flushed red and streaked with tears. “Why?”

He’s a little older than the rest, maybe eight years old, and he’s much more aware of what’s happening to him, understanding of its awful finality. He looks down with pleading eyes, dangling pitifully from where Stiles has nailed his hands and feet to the tree, shuddering in agony asking why over and over again. There’s bewilderment in the question, as much as there is pain, and Stiles decides to cut this short.

He sprays the lighter fluid all over the kid’s clothes, lights the match flicks it, sets everything ablaze. The boy’s screams are louder and more inhuman than any sound he’s ever heard, high and shrieking and then suddenly gone.

Stiles stares, mesmerized by the charred and melting flesh sloughing off the bone. He stares too long and when he shakes himself from his stupor, the fire has spread, too wide for him to contain by himself.

A thrill of panic shoots through him, freezes him momentarily.

And then he runs.

He runs away, the crackling of the flames still echoing in his head, and he goes home and tries to sleep.

The body is found in the early hours of the next morning; the first of his victims to be discovered. The story hits the papers first, and then the news. And when it soon becomes clear that he’s not going to be hauled out of his house in cuffs, that’s he’s not a suspect or even on the police’s radar, Stiles’ fear quickly morphs into a new sort of twisty pleasure.

He realizes that he wants to be seen; not so much as to get caught, but enough to be recognized. He finds that he’s tired of burying his creations in the forest. He wants to set them on display.

 _Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair_ , he thinks gleefully.

(Years later, when he’s older and better understands the meaning of that poem, he will look back on this moment and laugh.)

*****

He’s very much unformed as a sexual being, even in comparison to his peers, who flounder their way through awkward backseat fumblings and expend most of their conversational energy on lusty gossip in the halls between classes. Sex is a foreign concept to him, both anatomically and as something worth desiring.

“Are you . . . bisexual?” Scott inquires one night after several hours of gaming in Stiles’ bedroom. He fiddles with the controller in his lap, not quite meeting Stiles’ eyes. “I don’t mind, you know, or whatever. It’s cool. We’re all cool with Danny, you know?”

Stiles pauses. He pops the cap off a new bottle of soda, takes a swig. “Where did _that_ come from?”

Scott shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Just the way you look at guys sometimes, I guess.” He bites his lip, looks worried. “It’s ok if you don’t want to talk about this. Or, uh, if I’m wrong, in which case you can just tell me to shut up. Definitely tell me to shut up if you’re, you know, _not_.”

It’s true, Stiles looks. He looks at Lydia Martin a lot, likes to daydream about stringing her up in some dark place with soft light beaming in through the rafters, snagging her skin on hooks and posing her like the angel she is, maybe keeping a lock of her gorgeous hair in a lockbox under his bed as a prize. He also looks at some the guys in the locker room after practice; just last week he jerked off to the thought of digging his fingernails into Isaac Lahey’s abs and ripping and pulling until his guts spilled out of his belly.

He loves bodies, wants them to come undone with a touch of his hand. Just not in the way others would expect.

He takes another sip. “No, I am,” he says, plays it off casually. “Just didn’t think you’d want to hear about it.”

Scott looks both relieved and offended. “Hey! I’m the coolest of the cool with that stuff.” He bops his shoulder against Stiles’, flashes him a teasing smile. “And good for you, dude. Twice as many fish in the sea, right?”

Stiles smiles back.

Scott is good-looking, too. He has an adorably offset jaw. Stiles thinks that if they weren’t friends, he’d like to bash that jawbone in with a hammer, just to ruin something pretty.

*****

And then that day, out in the deep of the woods. Derek Hale.

Stiles hears about the bisected corpse, drags Scott along to go looking for the missing half. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, he’s never had great self-preservation instincts; on some primal level he probably wants Scott to know what he is.

When they come across Derek, it takes Stiles a few seconds to put the name together with that face, and by the time he does, Derek’s expression has twisted into something both strange and familiar. Stiles feels a dark, coiling sensation deep in his gut. They stare at each other.

(Though neither of them are consciously aware of it at the time, they’ll later remember this moment for what it is: one predator recognizing another.)

*****

Werewolves are a complication Stiles could never have anticipated.

Scott looks at him warily now, gets that curious expression on his face like he’s right on the cusp of realization but can’t quite put the puzzle together. His skills may not be honed enough to completely separate truth from lies or to pick up the nuances of scent that betray Stiles’ most carefully guarded impulses, but he can definitely tell something is off. He now knows that there’s something he hasn’t sensed in his best friend before, something hidden.

Derek . . . is a bit of a mystery. He slams Stiles into walls and glares at his jokes, plays at annoyance and stoicism, all the while keeping himself closed off, distant. He’s cautious. There’s the distinct possibility that he knows _exactly_ what Stiles is, but if that’s the case, he’s not saying anything.

“You’re a weird dude, you know that?” Stiles tells him on multiple occasions.

Derek just grunts.

*****

He doesn’t kill again until after Peter, when things settle down again for a while.

He breaks pattern and selects a girl, a lonely kid with brown eyes and an overbite. He leaves her in the shade of the freeway overpass, bludgeoned to a pulp, a crimson smear on the concrete incline.

His father goes through half of the liquor cabinet that week.

“There are monsters out there, son,” he says, eyes bloodshot and breath rank. “You can’t even imagine.”

“I can,” Stiles replies, confident that this conversation won’t be remembered.

*****

“It was you,” Derek says. It’s the first they’ve spoken since he became an Alpha.

Stiles raises an eyebrow, spins in his rolling chair. “Come in,” he says, gestures vaguely. “Make yourself at home.” He stretches. “Heard you’ve been starting your own pack. Erica Reyes, right? Who else?”

Derek steps in through the window and keeps his distance. “It was you,” he repeats, ignoring him. His face is expressionless, but his eyes are sharp and anxious. “That girl.”

“And others,” Stiles says, dipping his head in acknowledgement. There’s no use in lying.

Derek swallows. “Why?” he asks, and that’s a little disappointing. Stiles expected more.

“Do you really care?” he says. His mouth twists sardonically. “For that matter, do you actually think there’s a reason?”

Derek growls, but it’s low and suppressed, frustrated. “How about you give me a reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now?”

Stiles squirms, a pleasant jolt shooting up his spine. “I don’t have one.” He grins. “But you won’t.”

The werewolf’s eyes flash red in the dark, and then he’s climbing back out the window and disappearing without another word.

Before bed, Stiles strokes himself to orgasm and imagines what it would feel like to be Derek’s prey, to feel those teeth rip out his throat and those claws tear into his flesh, to die torn limb from limb, or to be swallowed alive and digested, or simply eviscerated in a single burst of animalistic rage. And it’s the best jack off he’s ever had.

*****

“You know you can tell me stuff,” Scott says slowly. “I know I’ve had my head up my own ass for a while, with Allison and everything else.”

Stiles waves him off. “You’ve had a lot to deal with,” he says. “I understand.” He means it, too, in as much as he's capable of playing at empathy.

Scott stares at the ground. Stiles doesn’t need supernatural sense to pick up on his unease. “Still. I feel like . . . maybe I don’t know you anymore. Or just, maybe I’ve missed out on some things. Important things.”

Stiles gazes at him, unblinking. “Is there something you wanna ask me, buddy?”

A pause. Scott draws in a slow, shaky breath. He shakes his head. “No. Nothing in particular.”

*****

Strangely, anticlimactically, there are no more developments on that front. Not for a long, long time.

Their lives are swallowed by the supernatural, and there’s not room for much of anything else. Stiles can barely keep track of it all. It’s all shoved into some back room inside his head, arranged haphazardly by singular events:

Kanima. Gerard. Darach. Peter (again). Alpha Pack. Erica and Boyd. Cora. The Nemeton.

Throughout it all, Derek.

And then the Nogitsune.

*****

“I must say, I have outdone myself this time,” the demon boasts, and Stiles can feel its delight creeping inside every part of himself.

“I’m going to destroy you,” he says calmly. “However long it takes.”

“Oh, I have no doubt that you shall try,” it retorts, leering at him from out of the hollow space where it has nested in the darkness of his mind.

“You can see me,” Stiles says. “You know me, know everything about me. So do not doubt for an instant that this isn’t the biggest mistake you’ve ever made.”

The Nogitsune laughs. “You _are_ a different sort of animal, aren’t you, boy?”

Stiles breathes slowly, nostrils flaring. “Yes I am.”

*****

When it’s over, after it’s dead (along with Allison), and they’ve all retreated back to their respective hiding places to lick their wounds, Derek comes and finds him.

And Stiles knows, as soon as he sees the look on the werewolf’s face, exactly what this is about.

“I kill children,” he says, interrupting as Derek opens his mouth to speak. “Almost exclusively. I don’t rape them, but I gain their trust and take them away and tear them apart.” The words taste like lightning on his tongue. It’s so strange to acknowledge this between the two of them, after so long of ignoring it.

Derek looks devastated, though not entirely surprised. “Stiles,” he says, and he sounds _wrecked_.

“I don’t do it because I have to,” Stiles continues. “I do it because I want to. I’ve never even tried to stop. And I never will.”

Derek raises his head, expression contorting into something defiant. “You haven’t, though,” he says. “In a while. I’ve been watching you. You haven’t . . . you haven’t had time.”

Stiles shrugs. “But I will again. Someday.”

“And what if I don’t let you? What if I stop you?”

“Then nothing.” Stiles shrugs again, bigger and more exaggerated. “I’d say that I can’t stop you from stopping me, but I probably could, if it came to that. But I hope it doesn’t. You’ve grown on me.”

Derek’s face crumples, and he looks like he might actually cry. “I’m in love with you,” he says bitterly, and Stiles stops breathing for a second. Because that’s the one thing he could never have prepared himself to hear. “I’m in love with you, and I’ve been through hell trying to _stop_ loving you because you’re the worst person I know.”

“I don’t know about that . . .” Stiles says, voice barely a whisper. “We’ve known a lot of bad people.” Derek doesn’t laugh.

“I have no idea what the fuck that says about me, that I can’t turn this thing off. Even knowing what you are, what you’ve _done_ , I still can’t help _wanting_.” He sighs, shoulders slumping, and he looks so completely defeated, more drained and empty than Stiles can ever recall seeing him. “I’m in love with a monster, and I really don’t know how I’m supposed to live with that.”

Stiles stands and walks to him slowly, like he’s approaching a skittish animal. There are about a million thing racing through his mind, and none seem appropriate to voice. He can’t imagine actually saying what’s on the tip of his tongue, which is, _You are the one person I want to be with me when I die._

So instead he stands on his toes and curls a hand around the back of Derek’s neck and kisses him.

*****

Three weeks later he steals his dad’s revolver from the safe under the floorboards and shoots a four year old playing with a beach ball outside in the rain.


End file.
